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Nice little puzzle game with a few new twists to the genre. The pixel art was nice, although I thought the main player could have been a bit more animated as they move around.

I powered through the early levels and they introduced new challenges at a reasonable rate.

However once I got to the Sinister level (classic maze in appearance) the game seems to have added a random element that can mean you need to get lucky as well as solve the puzzle. Basically when chased by the monsters you have to choose where to hide and it is just 50/50 if the monsters comes your way or not. Adding a looped area to hide in would solve this problem so the player can always escape if they are quick enough. Taking away skill and adding random deaths definitaly puts me off a puzzle game. Apart from that though nice presentation and spooky story.

(7 edits) (+1)

Hello! Thanks for playing and for your review, very much appreciated!

Sinister is, despite maybe appearing so, not at all random, and for those who speak Latin (I certainly do not) the solution is actually in the name: "sinister" means "left" in Latin, and that's the direction the monsters that are present in this maze always turn. Thus they rotate around the maze in a clockwise fashion. That knowledge is what Sinister tries to test, but I don't want people to bounce off a level because they feel they are not in control, so I will certainly consider whether the level is doing that job well. I might consider making Sinister a smaller level, both to give the player a better overview of the monster movement, and to enable quicker iteration, thus making failures less frustrating.

All the monsters currently present in Abysm are "wall huggers",  exploring the space by constantly turning either left or right, depending on the type of monster. This is exactly for the reason you highlighted: puzzle games need to be deterministic. No monster will ever "chase" the player like they would in a typical action game. On a similar note, boulders always fall to the left if neither side is blocked. 

Another thing to note maybe is that if you get stuck on a level you can choose "Skip level" and move on to the next for the time being, this way one can work on a few levels in parallel, something that I know I need to communicate better.

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Ah, I see that is neat. Good to know you have it under control, as you say informing the player of this is tricky. I shall have to give it another go later. 

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I just uploaded a new version of the demo with Sinister pushed into the next episode, replaced by Móshì.  Also added a bunch more small but hopefully non-intrusive hints to the first few chambers... things like explaining chamber skips, and that one can turn on a chamber timer.

Thanks for the help!

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I made a new release and while the player isn't more animated when moving around, still need to figure out how to do that, he does have a small idle animation, still inspired by your comment. Thanks!